Devil's Advocate: Forcefields are awesome

All forcefields do is make an area on the ground unpathable and push units already there away. But forcefields have provided for some very emergent gameplay. They can be used for anything, in battles, cut retreat paths, sneaky ramp block warp prism tactics, luring someone in to their main with blink stalkers, thne blinking out and forcefielding the ramp, keeping dts out of your base while you tech to observer. Save a red nexus surrounded by lings by spamming forcefields around it. They can even be used to cancel nukes by pushing the ghost away you can't see.

Forcefields are pretty much the only ability that actually takes skill

We're all cynical about 'great emp', 'great storms', 'great fungals' while there's nothing that amazing about it. But actually getting a line of forcefields down in a half a second with zero overlap in the right position, that's actually pretty darn hard. Forcefields are an ability with a lot of degrees of success from a lot of overlap and gaps to no overlap at all and in the perfect position.

Forcefields do not do damage

Despite its enormous potential, they do not do damage, this means that forcefields do not stack and sentries are always going to need support, no matter how good forcefields are in the hands of a master, pure sentry, unlike pure infestor, just will never fly.

Forcefields bring finesse

Rather than just applying the sledgehammer, massing roaches and going for it. A forcefield-supported army has more finesse to it, the units are weak on their own but a zoning and divide and conquer strategy is used to in the end come out on top. Engagements are no longer about brute force but about very surgical partitioning and positioning.

Forcefields force engagements and micro to matter

Let's face it, without forcefields flanks would be bloody irrelevant against the protoss army. You'd just pushg your roaches up against it and they'd all fire anyway. Forcefields make flanks and positioning matter. Make terrain matter, make zoning out the army of the opponent to deny a good position or acquire a good position to fight in relevant. Every Zerg knows the horror of Protoss getting into that position at the third on Bel'Shir vestige. The solution: Don't let them get there, engage on favourable ground before they get there, it means you have to be mindful of the location of your army because forcefields make positioning and terran matter that much more.

Without forcefields, ZvP would simply be roach vs roach, micro and positioning would hardly matter any more, it would just be stalkers and immortals amoving into roaches and hydralisks for the most part.

Forcefields make engagements last longer

Forcefields reduce the collective dps of the enemy army, of course they make engagements take longer. In your typical PvZ 2base all in when it starts no one knows who's going to win, they can take super long, some up to 7 minutes and it's generally close until the end. It doesn't just come down to composition and numbers, it comes down to micro and positioning from both sides.

Forcefields create hype

How many times has the crowd gone wild over a 4 hp colossus surviving because forcefields blocked the marauders of from killing it? From MC just walking a sentry across the map to randomly forcefield a ramp and killa nexus with 2 zealots and a sentry? From 20 roaches being trapped inside forcefields gone down in a second by a master? As much as people say they hate them, they go wild when they are used in an oppressive manner.

WCS Apartheid cometh, all hail the casual audience, death to merit and hard work.

Forcefields make map making stupid, because every map has to be designed in a way that protoss survives early with the help of FFs (because without them protoss is too weak) and at the same time that there are no real chokes or anything because then force fields are too powerful. That one reason makes forcefields suck, even though I agree that the ability itself in a game is kinda cool.

On January 13 2014 23:28 Ammanas wrote:Forcefields make map making stupid, because every map has to be designed in a way that protoss survives early with the help of FFs (because without them protoss is too weak) and at the same time that there are no real chokes or anything because then force fields are too powerful. That one reason makes forcefields suck, even though I agree that the ability itself in a game is kinda cool.

With the MSC almost no one FE with sentries, and while they help, they are not the only way of defense for protoss.

On January 13 2014 23:27 Velr wrote:Forcefields are one of the main reason Protoss feels „dumb“. The entire race had to be designed around this one spell (and warpgate).

This is bad and has been talked to dead in a miriad of other topics and blogs.

Every race is designed around its components. The entirety of Terran is obviously designed around the power of the mule, every Zerg unit has to be weaker because of larvae and queens. Zerg units' speed is designed around creep.

Protoss doesn't feel 'dumb' to me. People say the race is dirty and it can be very dirty but in that famous 'dirty' vid of Miwa I saw a lot of very well put together tactics. I'm sorry but luring someone into their main with stalkers, then blinking out and forcefielding the ramp isn't "dirty" in my opinion, it's tactically outplaying your opponent and a thing of beauty. A smart player when seeing that would split of 4 lings and move them to the front of the natural to kill any sentry that might try this, these are the kinds of responses and tactics that forcefields force and if you aren't aware enough of the possibility of this happening then it will happen to you.

WCS Apartheid cometh, all hail the casual audience, death to merit and hard work.

On the otherhand I think the MSC is a true bandaid unit. Just yet another spellcaster protoss is 100@ reliant on...

Don't really like msc in the current form, I said during the beta that it should be a macro mechanic, a gas mule that can target an assimilator for 50 energy every 90 seconds to make probes return 5 instead of 4 gas. That way forcing an overcharge or recall actually costs gas. Currently, forcing overcharges is something you should always do but all it does is forcing overcharges. Also, it's one unit so if you lose it when you shouldn't you don't have overcharge which is pretty important. Had a TvP today, protoss goes to scout with the mothership core but loses it and I walk across the map after that and kill my opponent with 8 marines, would've been held easily with overcharge and protoss obviously depended on that, but hey, lose your core and you can very well die to a reactive timing.

WCS Apartheid cometh, all hail the casual audience, death to merit and hard work.

You are so wrong it hurts.FF is a shit mechanic indeed.1st It limits micro and small scale skirmishes. On a strategic scale, the fact that it cuts off retreat paths, or creates ways to retreat is dumb, because this is a positional game, you should be punished for being out of position, however at the same time you shouldn't be punished to such an extent that you lose your entire army, and FF is the worst of both worlds here. It allows Protoss a sort of get out of jail card even though he should have been punished for being in a bad position, and it also heavily punishes an opponent that over commits by making him lose his entire army or significant chunks of it.

On a tactical scale its even worst, you can't stutter step out of it, you can't split out of it, you can't focus fire against it, the FF just throws all those options out the window. Spells like storm or EMP are a lot better, because it forces constant dynamic back and forth posturing, and you can still do something about them even when they land, however with FF, once it lands its over, you've likely lost those units or will take heavy damage while trying to evacuate them with medviacs or burrow.

Ever wonder why PvX matches are so dull and boring, with so much build time on all sides? Its because FF prevent players from being out on the map with small force of units and trying to jock for position, against FF you can't be out on the map, because one bad FF and you've lost your entire army, so you have to wait until you have stim + medivacs or a large enough force as zerg that it doesn't matter.FF slows the game down by at least 5 minutes if not more.

I also don't even want to touch on what effects it has had upon map making. All maps need to always have a certain size of corridors, chokes, ramps and a certain type of openness, or its just bad, either its too good for FF, or its very bad for it. As a result all maps are forced into a certain type of structure with very little room to work around.

Lastly, the fact that GW units have to be weaker, because of Warp in and FF, is not a + for the game. It doesn't make protoss a more interesting race, it just pidgeon holes them into certain strategies. Deathball on the one hand, because protoss units for the most part are so shitty they can only become cost efficient when fighting as a whole, and 2nd, all-ins, because FFs + WG at a time in the game where the opponent can't easily counter them with mass of units or tech, is super efficient. The net result is just bad, its boring and predictable.

Basically you are wrong about each and every point you make, and the worst thing is, you don't even realize it, you can't even fathom how bad FF are for this game, you genuinely believe they are good, which makes me lose faith in humanity, that such a flat out bad mechanic isn't evident to everyone.

WriterWhat am I without a challenge? An opportunity to better myself? A chance to shoot for the stars? A struggle for perfection? I am nothing, I live for the challenge.

I agree with all the points you made. When SC2 came out, I thought: man, what a great ability, I bet we'll see some creative stuff and crazy micro with this. However, it appears that force fields were ultimately bad for the game. With forcefields and defensive warp-ins against harassment, protoss has a large defender's advantage that leads to colossus deathball play. Also, I find it incredibly frustrating to send a zerg army against a protoss army and not get a single shot off. No matter how much of an army advantage you have, it is impossible to break a protoss's ramp while a single sentry is present. Compare this to blink stalkers: another ability with flexible applications in different situations and great micro potential. However, it doesn't break the game.

I completely agree and was always thinking the same. The problem is that people just hate everything they lose to. Thus, every aspect of the game that can quickly turn the tides, is hated upon, because it is a visible thing to which people lost, while when there are lots of small stupid things, almost noobody whines about them, because it's not easy to connect the loss with them. Sadly, this is the reason why we are slowly losing everything interesting, because Blizzard listens (if reluctantly) to common bitching. I have said many times that I would prefer Blizzard to not to listen to the "community" in most aspects. Also, the whole mapmaking community is guilty, as they have created a "standard" to which they require everyone to adhere, (otherwise the map is "bad") which forbids creating maps where something is strong (ffs, tanks, blinkstalkers ...), thus killing any unusual gameplay.

In the end, everything converges to absolute blandness in the holy name of balance, where the only things that survive the endelss vawes of nerfs are the most uncotroversial, thus most boring.

I self-identify as rabidly anti-Russian | "If you were to have a c-section to remove a fetus at 8 months I wouldn't consider it mandatory to then kill the baby, just for the sake of completeness." -Kwark

On January 14 2014 00:32 opisska wrote:I completely agree and was always thinking the same. The problem is that people just hate everything they lose to. Thus, every aspect of the game that can quickly turn the tides, is hated upon, because it is a visible thing to which people lost, while when there are lots of small stupid things, almost noobody whines about them, because it's not easy to connect the loss with them. Sadly, this is the reason why we are slowly losing everything interesting, because Blizzard listens (if reluctantly) to common bitching. I have said many times that I would prefer Blizzard to not to listen to the "community" in most aspects. Also, the whole mapmaking community is guilty, as they have created a "standard" to which they require everyone to adhere, (otherwise the map is "bad") which forbids creating maps where something is strong (ffs, tanks, blinkstalkers ...), thus killing any unusual gameplay.

In the end, everything converges to absolute blandness in the holy name of balance, where the only things that survive the endelss vawes of nerfs are the most uncotroversial, thus most boring.

No, you are wrong. The map makers have no guilt in this, they genuinely can't create maps outside certain bounds because then the map will be broken, either in favor of or against Protoss, its that simple. And please make at least an effort to try to understand how bad the mechanic is before you post, it limits micro, its limits strategic options, and it limits certain kinds of gameplay.

WriterWhat am I without a challenge? An opportunity to better myself? A chance to shoot for the stars? A struggle for perfection? I am nothing, I live for the challenge.

I agree with some of the points made. I think forcefields can make for extremely entertaining games, strategies and engagements. They do however limit map design a lot which is probably the biggest downside to them.

The problem I have with forcefields is that I wish there was more that could be done in response. With Terran, at least, you can pick up the units with medivacs and micro them out that trap. With protoss it's expected that both players will eventually get an archon or colossus so that they can walk over FFs to save units or push up a ramp if they need to. But with zerg it's "oh, I got forcefielded? Guess I'm screwed". Unless you get burrow movement roaches or Ultras, there isn't really any micro you can do once you are forcefielded.

I dunno, watching pro level ZvP, if the zerg scouts everything and reacts correctly, it still feels like the result of the match hangs on the protoss player, but not so much the zerg player. If the protoss player has perfect micro, they win. If they make a mistake (like the incomplete forcefield wall a la Trap vs Soulkey) they lose. I'm trying to think of a pro ZvP with sentries where you could legitimately say "oh my god look at that amazing micro from the zerg." And I'm drawing a blank. Yeah, Jaedong's burrow vs Dear was sexy and all, but he just had to press the unburrow key.

I agree that sentries are pretty cool, but a matchup where one player can make awesome brilliant micro moves and the other player can't is a bit frustrating to watch. (And play for me, but I'm far from being pro so whatever). Granted, the correct solution to this is to give zerg units more microability rather than to nerf forcefield. I do like that Blizzard keeps buffing burrow movement, for instance; I'd like to see that be inexpensive/good enough that it shows up in more pro games.

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